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Marilyn led worship from her great-great's book of prayers. Since she will soon be driving back to Georgia from California, her gathering question was about any early road trip we remember. Memories included driving without a license in a 1979 Buick sedan, the family's trips to Panama City, what Nuno discovered about the bathroom on the bus to Monterrey, unscheduled stops on the band trip to NYC, and being in the back of the station wagon with the carsick dog. Here's a link to On Track, a poem about a train to California, Scott's earliest memory, and also about the feelings stirred by the book we read, Reading the Bible from the Margins.
Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World, Unit 5, Vocation:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: None.
Susan resolved the centuries-old debate over faith and works: Paul always equated faith with faithfulness, so practice is always part of his teaching.
Year 3 readers were amazed (not in a good way) at how quickly the rationalist reaction to the political power of the church turned into a new form of Puritanism -- ripping those haloes off the saints and forbidding demonstrations of faith. Eventually, the Enlightenment settled into bland atheism -- for Marilyn, that was like the transition from passionate hate to something worse: indifference.
The theme of doubt or questioning came up in Y1 as well. Jessica was surprised by what she found reading Ecclesiastes straight through, what Collins calls "bitter but honest realism [that] resonates with those skeptical about the world’s coherence." Nuno added, “I was fond of it when I was a teenager” – a little angsty.
Having read My Neighbor's Faith a few times, Scott instead took up another book on the same subject that he has read only once before, Holy Envy by Barbara Brown Taylor. Doubts and questions are important to the arc of Taylor's memoir -- Episcopal priest quits church to teach world religions at a small GA college, and her deepening engagement with other faiths leads her back to her own. Stay tuned for more. Scott's blogpost My Neighbor's Faith and NPR's Theology is one of his greatest hits -- scoring big on Facebook and shared to an Episcopal Church discussion board.
We took time out to film a promotional video for EfM. The script was a collage of lines that we wrote for an "elevator pitch" earlier this month. Scott expects to take a couple of sentences from each participant.
Pete gave us a choice: naughty, or nice? We went with "naughty" and got what we asked for, this painting by Max Ernst from 1926:
It looked at first like a joke -- that halo on the floor! -- a parody of pictures like the one by Leonardo. But the picture was disorienting; "you want to look away" (as the witnesses at the window do). We saw shame, anger, distortion of relationship. We shied away from our visceral reaction, remarking instead on the artist's technical choices. But when stories from the "Action" source bubbled up, memories of being spankers or spankees, we took "parental punishment" to be our focus.
When we connected to the theme, we agreed that punishment works for some children, but makes others defiant; and the parent NEVER feels good about it (though sometimes you feel like you've got to to what you've got to do). When we looked to our tradition, we saw how God the Father punished his children, and how it didn't work for Him, either. But in Jesus, the Father makes himself vulnerable to his children, and takes the suffering upon himself. "It changes the dynamic between a just punishment and a vengeful punishment," someone said. We stepped back to look at punishment in our society, too: a difference between what we say our prisons do and the results.
Scott remembered, too late for the meeting, a phrase from Lamentations that he used as epigraph for his poem Eulogy: For He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. - Lamentations 3.33
We'll miss Kathy, who will be in Portugal until May 10. Jessica will lead worship and bring a gathering question; Nuno will bring a source for a TR. Pete will keep his "nice" TR in reserve!
